Tuesday, 14 September 2010

Favourite Art Books

In the Snooze Academy, art always wins the homeschool day! The boys find it relaxing and rewarding and we all learn a lot along the journey. We get a lot of ideas for art projects from websites and blogs (and always link to these when we do) but also use books and these are a few of our current favourites:

This is an excellent book for finding out all about some of the greatest masters in the art world with one or two projects for each artist. They are graded by ability, by time taken and use a variety of techniques and materials, so great for ideas for using all the different art materials we seem to be constantly accumulating! It is a little short on illustrations of what the "finished product" might look like, but in some ways that is a good thing.

We used the Impressionist version of this book extensively when Gman was doing his impressionist lapbook earlier in the year. We also have editions on Expressionist Art, Pop Art and Surrealism. They are all fabulous, fabulous books! Each artist is introduced by a section showing a piece of their work followed by questions about the piece which really get the children properly looking at and thinking about the picture. Then there are a couple of different projects for each artist with very clear instructions and pictures of the completed work by children of various ages. We recently did some "Picasso faces" using this book as a springboard:

I cannot recommend this series of books highly enough. They really are excellent.

Drawing Lab for Mixed Media Artists is our new favourite art inspiration book. This book isn't aimed at children but there are a lot of ideas in it that could be used by kids. There are 52 different "labs", each giving a starting point for drawing. They are light hearted, fun and whimsical, just what we like :-). To get an idea of the sort of thing included in the book, check out the author's blog, especially the assignments and tutorials down the left hand side.